OCTOBER 8–Angered by a delay in the receipt of his voter registration card, a Louisiana man today threatened election officials, claiming that he urgently needed to cast a ballot to “keep the nigger out of office,” according to police. Wade Williams, 75, was arrested this morning on a felony terrorizing charge after allegedly calling the Registrar of Voters and warning that he would come to the state office and empty his shotgun unless he got his registration card.

Well, last night removed any doubt, when McCain â€” twice â€” used Obamaâ€™s requested earmark of three million dollars for Adler planetarium as a bludgeon, trying to pin Obama as another pork-barrel politician. He disdainfully said the money was for an “overhead projector”. Those are his exact words. Hereâ€™s what he said:

While we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks he [Senator Obama, or “that one”] voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects. Including $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?

Well, shock of shocks â€” it turns out McCainâ€™s characterization of this was all wrong. In fact, I would call it a lie. He knows it wasnâ€™t for an overhead projector, a piece of classroom equipment that costs a couple of hundred dollars. That money was for Adlerâ€™s Zeiss Mark VI star projector: a venerable piece of precision fabricated equipment that projects the stars, constellations, and other objects inside the planetarium dome. Adlerâ€™s Zeiss is 40 years old, and desperately needs replacing. These machines are pricey, and replacing them difficult.

Adler needed money to do this. They asked local politicians, and eventually were able to get a request in a budget submitted by Obama. However, Obama never even voted on that budget, and Adler never got that money â€” thus making, again, McCain a liar.

I sensed that Sarah Palin was nervous. Well, she had every right to be, and as I thought about the debate during the day on Thursday, I felt some empathy for her: In university terms, she was being asked to defend her doctoral thesis without having written it. If that had been me facing Joe Biden with the same preparation, I don’t know if I could even have walked onto the stage.

So she was understandably nervous, and you could tell that by her rapid speech, faster than what we’ve heard from her before . Listening to her voice, you could also sense when she felt she’d survived the deep waters of improvisation and was climbing onto the shore of talking points. When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two or three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in “Fargo.”

Palin is best in that persona. You want to smile with her and wink back. But who did she resemble more? Marge Gunderson, whose peppy pleasantries masked a remorseless policewoman’s logic? Or Jerry Lundegaard, who knew he didn’t have the car on his lot, but smiled when he said, “M’am, I been cooperatin’ with ya here.” Palin was persuasive. But I felt a brightness that was not always convincing.

This is an absolute first and frankly it’s f—ing brilliant. The California Democratic Party has a giant electronic billboard up somewhere near a Los Angeles-area rally that Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is doing today that is displaying live text-message questions people are sending in. On top of that, the whole thing is streaming live back onto the web using UStream.tv.